{"id":733457,"date":"2026-06-29T19:49:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T19:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/733457\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T19:49:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T19:49:09","slug":"what-to-know-about-this-months-strawberry-micromoon-nbc-chicago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/733457\/","title":{"rendered":"What to know about this month\u2019s strawberry micromoon \u2013 NBC Chicago"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month\u2019s full moon will finally rise on Monday evening, and it will be a unique one for Chicago-area residents. <\/p>\n

According to NASA, this month\u2019s full moon will be a \u201cmicromoon,\u201d one of the smallest of the year and the first of the summer season. <\/p>\n

So what is a \u201cmicromoon?\u201d Why is it called a \u201cstrawberry\u201d moon? And why might the moon not look so\u2026.micro? <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what you need to know. <\/p>\n

When is the June full moon? <\/p>\n

According to NASA, the full moon will officially occur Monday at 6:58 p.m., meaning it will have already technically been full before it rises over the Chicago area on Monday night. <\/p>\n

Why is it called the \u201cstrawberry\u201d moon? <\/p>\n

According to the Royal Museums Greenwich, the \u201cstrawberry moon\u201d <\/a>gets its name not from a reddish color on its surface, but because of the time of year when it occurs, as strawberries are typically harvested beginning in June in North America.<\/p>\n

Other cultures have different names for the full moon in June, including the \u201chot moon\u201d since June is the official start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere.<\/p>\n

What else will be special about this month\u2019s full moon? <\/p>\n

According to NASA, this month\u2019s full moon is considered a \u201cmicromoon,\u201d so named because it occurs near the timing of the moon\u2019s apogee, or its furthest point from Earth. <\/p>\n

The moon\u2019s orbit around the planet is not a perfect oval, meaning it is different distances from Earth at different times in its orbit around the planet. As a result, there are times in the calendar when the moon appears as a \u201cmicromoon\u201d when its near its apogee, and as a \u201csupermoon\u201d when it occurs near perigee. <\/p>\n

This month\u2019s \u201cmicromoon\u201d will be the final one of 2026, according to NASA, with the next \u201csupermoon\u201d set to take place in late November. <\/p>\n

Wait, why doesn\u2019t the \u201cmicromoon\u201d actually look super small? <\/p>\n

The sun and the moon appear differently in the Northern Hemisphere\u2019s skies during different parts of the year. Whereas the sun is higher in the sky during the summer in the Northern Hemisphere and lower during the winter, the moon is the opposite, appearing lower in the sky during the summer months. <\/p>\n

As a result, the perception of \u201cmicromoons\u201d and \u201csupermoons\u201d is a bit different during the summer, and when the moon rises on Monday night, it might still appear to be a normal-sized or even perhaps slightly bigger than usual because of how low it will be in the southeastern sky. <\/p>\n

One thing to remember about the way the moon looks when it first rises and when it reaches its apex in the sky: it\u2019s all an illusion.<\/a><\/p>\n

According to NASA, the \u201cmoon illusion\u201d is our brains tricking us into thinking that the moon appears bigger when it\u2019s near the horizon than it does when it\u2019s high in the sky, but in reality the moon is the same size in the sky. <\/p>\n

According to NASA, there is no definitive explanation of why the \u201cmoon illusion\u201d takes place. The moon is the same width near the horizon as it is when it\u2019s high in the sky, but that\u2019s not how we perceive it. The moon\u2019s size is an illusion. The thought is our brains are responsible for it, but there\u2019s also a theory objects in the foreground can influence it, but NASA astronauts also see it when they\u2019re in orbit. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This month\u2019s full moon will finally rise on Monday evening, and it will be a unique one for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":733458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[718,79,193],"class_list":["post-733457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-nasa","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/733458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}